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Met Aims to Build Itself a Museum-Quality Plaza

A rendering of the new plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as envisioned by the Philadelphia design firm OLIN.Credit
OLIN

More than 40 years after its last makeover, the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is showing its age: the fountains are leaking, the sidewalk is crumbling, and the trees are dying. Overcrowding on the institution’s grand front steps — one of the most popular meeting places in Manhattan — often causes bottlenecks for visitors trying to get to the front door.

Now an ambitious plan is in the works to transform this four-block-long stretch along Fifth Avenue, from 80th to 84th Street, into a more efficient, pleasing and environmentally friendly space, with new fountains, tree-shaded allées, seating areas, museum-run kiosks and softer, energy-efficient nighttime lighting.

A meeting was held at 6 p.m. on Tuesday for officials from the Met to sit down with some 2,000 neighborhood residents to explain the project. If all goes as scheduled, and the institution receives approval from various city agencies — including the Public Design Commission, Landmarks Preservation Commission, Department of Parks and Recreation, Department of Environmental Protection, Department of Cultural Affairs and the Department of Transportation — construction will begin as early as this fall and is expected to be finished by the summer of 2014.

“Our first priority is to create an appropriate entrance to the greatest encyclopedic museum in the world, one that is attractive and welcoming rather than austere and forbidding,” said Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director and chief executive. At the moment, he added, “the plaza is a frying pan in the summer and a wind tunnel in the winter.” The museum will stay open during construction, although parts of the sidewalk may be closed at times.

Photo

The museum entrance as it is today.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

OLIN, the Philadelphia landscape architecture and urban design firm behind the renewals of Bryant Park and Columbus Circle, has planned the project and will serve as its lead designer. David H. Koch, a Met trustee and the philanthropist who in 2008 pledged $100 million to renovate the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center — which was renamed for him — is providing $60 million to finance it. But the plaza will not be named after him.

“It all began when I was invited to attend the restarting of the fountains on Lincoln Center’s plaza” in 2009, Mr. Koch said in a telephone interview. “When the water started shooting up and was so beautifully illuminated, it blew me away. That’s when I suddenly got the idea that it would be great if the Met did something similar with their crummy fountains.”

He mentioned this to Emily K. Rafferty, the museum’s president, who told him that the institution had been thinking about a project like this for years but didn’t have the resources.

Mr. Koch, a chemical engineer by training, said he was curious to see what could be done. Mr. Campbell recalled that when the museum started to investigate repairing its fountains, it “opened up a broad rethinking of the plaza as a whole.” One thing led to another, and the museum started a design competition.

“OLIN’s design was as dramatic as anything I’d ever seen,” Mr. Koch said. “I fell in love with this project,” so much, he explained, that “I decided we should go for everything.”

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A rendering of the Fifth Avenue facade of the Met with its new plaza, which will stretch from 80th to 84th Street, with permanent seating and allées of topiary-cut trees on the north and south ends.Credit
OLIN

When the plaza was last redesigned, in 1968, attention was paid to vehicular access, leaving sidewalks wide enough for cars, but now, with the Met’s attendance having more than doubled and with it the amount of foot traffic around the plaza, the aim is to make the space more people-friendly. (Although, to be fair, most visitors even now are probably more impressed by the grandeur of the museum’s building and its entrance than bothered by the “austere and forbidding” nature of the plaza.)

The plan calls for replacing the two long fountains that now flank the front steps with a pair of smaller square ones, made of granite, to be placed closer to the steps, thereby allowing clearer paths to the museum’s 81st and 83rd Street entrances, which are on street level and which many people don’t even know exist. Each fountain will be programmed by computer to provide a variety of water patterns during the warm months. In winter they will become reflecting pools, warmed by recycling steam to prevent freezing. Two sides of each fountain will serve as benches.

The 44 ailing trees at either end of the plaza will be replaced with more than twice that number. There will be shaded allées of little-leaf linden trees to the north and south, clipped as topiaries, similarly to the trees at the Palais Royal in Paris. Outside the 81st and 83rd Street entrances, small groves of London plane trees will be planted to create paths that will guide visitors into the entrances. They will be pruned to maximize shade in the summer and sunlight in the winter. Together these plantings are also supposed to soften noise.

Ornamental shrubs and herbaceous flowers will be placed along the base of the building on either side of the central staircase, resembling those seen in photographs of the museum taken in the early-to-mid 20th century.

The new sidewalk will have two patterns of granite in shades of gray. In addition to the fountain seating, there will be permanent benches and red retractable parasols on the north and south parts of the plaza, as well as movable tables and chairs beneath the groves of trees.

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A rendering of the Beaux-Arts facade at night illuminated by LED lighting that is energy efficient and tailored to highlight architectural details.Credit
L’Observatoire International

A pair of bronze kiosks are also part of the plan. One, near the 81st Street entrance, will provide visitors with information and expedited ticketing, and another, on 83rd Street, will sell light refreshments. The street vendors now in front of the museum will have designated places where they, too, can set up shop.

Dennis McGlade, a landscape architect who is a partner at OLIN, said the firm had looked for inspiration to the Beaux-Arts architecture of the museum, including the central building designed by Richard Morris Hunt and Richard Howland Hunt, which opened in 1902, and the slightly newer wings on either side by McKim, Mead & White.

“We studied the original McKim drawings and thought about this in a classical way,” Mr. McGlade explained. He and his partners also looked at other public places around Manhattan, including ones their firm had designed, like Bryant Park, Columbus Circle and the Fifth Avenue terrace in front of the New York Public Library.

New LED lighting will make a striking difference in the plaza at night. The museum’s facade is currently illuminated by floodlights across the street, an approach that uses a great deal of power and makes for lighting that the architects describe as overly harsh. They will be replaced with energy-efficient lights mounted on the museum’s facade, as well as angled up-lights on the sidewalk. They will have dimmers and be programmed to enhance the architectural ornaments of the building.

“Nothing gaudy,” Mr. Campbell said. “Just majestic.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 8, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Met Aims to Build Itself a Museum-Quality Plaza. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe